‘Red-tape’ is at the heart of the BBC’s democratic remit

The so-called ‘sharing economy’ is composed largely of opaque shoddily
managed companies. Rather than mimicking these models, the BBC must make the
case for improving and developing its much-lamented bureaucracy.

Ant Smith/Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The recent
attacks on the BBC in the run-up to its charter renewal have all had something
in common: a distrust of a media organisation owned and run by the government.

Daily Mail stories on the BBC
endlessly reference “BBC bosses”, sometimes to
critique the salaries (too high, they argue, for license fee-funded jobs), but
also to remind us that the BBC is controlled from the top down. The
organisation’s nickname, “Auntie”, fell into popular usage in the 1950s to
critique its “prudish, cosy,
puritanical ‘refrained’ image” in contrast to the fun and irreverant ITV.

It’s easy and
convenient to paint public service broadcasting in this light, as a kind of 1984-esque
government control tool, used to force diversity onto
our screens via the Great British Bakeoff’s casting and, in the words of
culture secretary Jon Whittingdale, to “dumb down” our culture.
Nothing original, independent-minded, and truly British, the argument goes, can
be funded by public money.

This new
apathy towards the state and its enterprises is long-running in the right-wing,
but lately, it seems to have made its way to the political mainstream.

In the US, the
current standoff between Apple and the FBI intrigued me because it displayed a
similar tendency. As a technology reporter embedded in the world of the
internet, where state control and surveillance is regarded with deep suspicion,
my initial reaction to the FBI’s demands that Apple unlock an iPhone belonging
to one of the San Bernardino shooters was disgust: in a post-Snowden world,
where would capitulation lead? US and UK governments have demonstrated they’re
willing to surveil us without our knowledge or permission - giving in here
would surely only lead to more demands from western governments across the
board.

Yet as
Guardian journalist Alex Hern pointed out on Twitter, your reaction to the
debate depends on whether you agree with this
statement: “Apple has a better sense than the FBI over when to release your data
to the government". A kneejerk assumption that Apple is somehow more
trustworthy than a federal bureau is more radical and new than many of those
who made it might realise.

It’s not that
state action should by any means be accepted without question (as the NSA and
GCHQ’s betrayals of public trust have shown), but that we seem to have willingly
moved our trust, wholesale, to huge, multinational corporations. ITV and
Channel 4 have “big bosses”, just as the BBC does, but we - and the media as a
whole - seem far less concerned with what they’re up to.

This same
pattern is repeated across the media: readers side with adblockers over those
who write the journalism they read, and viewers choose piracy over payment.

When
Rusbridger slammed the idea of paywalls in 2010, he described both the internet
and the rise of free media as “a new democracy of ideas and information”. Yet
it is one which favours the free over the paid-for, and, most concerning, the
experience of the customer over all else. There is little room in Rusbridger’s
description for the labour laws fought for over hundreds of years. Ideas and
information aren’t free – the idea that they should be ignores the rights of
those that produce them.

Nowhere is
this better demonstrated than in the sharing economy. Just as we expect
ad-free, free content online; we expect services to be cheaper and more easily
acquired than ever before. When we wait only minutes for an Uber which costs
around half the price of a black cab, we don’t think too hard about where those
savings come from.

The lie of the
sharing economy is that it’s new technology that enables those price cuts. In
reality, it’s mostly the lack of worker support, pensions, training, health and
safety, and formal company structures.

In recent
comments on adblockers, Jon Whittingdale noted: “If people don’t pay in some
ways for content, then the content will eventually no longer exist.” We want to
think that he’s wrong, that the overturn of capital as we know it has changed
the structures such that somehow, we can
have everything for free. But really, capital works in the same way as it ever
did: but we, as consumers, are expecting everything for less.

The sharing
economy landscape, as with the media landscape, begins to look totally
different once you look at it not as a range of new types of business, but
business as usual. Tom Slee, a British software designer living in Canada,
released a book titled What’s Yours is Mine, and in it, this is
precisely what he does. He points out that these “new” breeds of company are
steered by the same venture capitalists and billionaires - the same 1 per cent
- that controls the rest of the world’s industry. Even the smallest start-up
dreams of being bought.

In a recent
interview, I asked Slee what he thought the greatest danger posed by the sharing
economy was, and he replied, "they're fundamentally
antidemocratic and unaccountable. And I think when you have hugely
unaccountable institutions running things, they're always going to take
shortcuts."

Yet just as these undemocratic
companies multiply, the general antipathy to democratic government is rising.
As Slee puts it, “You talk about government - the role of government - and
there's very little receptiveness to that. Governments are a manifestation of
democracy. To me when democracy fails, the solution is more democracy, not to
walk away from it.”

This is why the BBC, rather than
moulding itself to match newer, less formal organisations, must demonstrate
that it is accountable; that it holds
itself to a higher standard than its competitors precisely because it is
publicly funded. Scandals at the higher levels of the organisation aren’t an
argument for a less rigid management structure – if anything, they’re proof
that a stricter one is needed. The organisation’s apparent weakness – its
bureaucracy – could prove to be its strength in an increasingly red tape-free
world. Red tape, it transpires, is sometimes necessary: it prevents mistakes,
keeps employees safe, and makes organisations accountable.

The growth
of the sharing and digital economies appear to threaten more traditional
organisations like the BBC, if we believe that they’re really offering new
models and new competition. But once we realise they’re just offering a
shoddier version of the structures we already had, the case for strengthening
the structures already in place becomes much clearer.

About the author

Barbara Speed (@bspeed8) is a technology and digital culture writer at the New Statesman and a staff writer at CityMetric.

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